The Construction of the Bourgeois Citizen-Subject in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right

We haven’t posted for a while, which is mostly my fault since last quarter was absolutely insane for me. This quarter looks to allow for a little more regularity.

I left off on the question of subjectivity in Kant, and though I could spend many more posts exploring the relationship between subjectivity and knowledge, I’d like to move on to something else, which gets us closer to critical theory; namely the relationship between subjectivity and freedom. It’s no surprise that Kant’s account of the subject raises a host of problems but two in particular are of interest here:

1) If all perceptions are mine including time and space, what is it that connects those perceptions together and ensures that it is still me from moment to moment? (In other words, what makes me a unity?)

2) Given this view of knowledge, what must I do and how is that to be accomplished?

The answer to both questions is essentially “the transcendental soul which is absolutely free” in Kant and Kantianism. It is your soul which is a nouminous object and absolutely free that unites your perceptions transcendentally (because nouminous objects are in themselves unities) and it is because of this freedom that you can fulfill your duty to the highest good by binding yourself to the moral law.

The question of freedom is vitally important and hotly contested in Kant’s time. If the universe is mechanistically determined (Newton), how can anyone be held responsible for anything one does? Thus, the commitment to freedom and explaining human action (i.e. history) in terms of freedom is of paramount importance at the turn of the 19th century. Freedom becomes the new foundation of ethical life.

We need to understand this shift in terms of what is new about freedom in the 19th century. In Aristotle, the law is coterminous with justice; that is, lawful acts are just acts and vice versa. The law forces us to behave justly in relation to others. Therefore, individuals have rights (or anything resembling rights as we understand them) only in the context of a just, lawful order. There is a priority of objective law to subjective rights. The law governs through educating and producing virtuous people. This outcome justifies the force of law–not even parents have the authority of this force. Only the political community can produce virtuous, law-abiding citizens. Therefore, the power of the law is internally unlimited. In this sense, the law has authority over both public and private life. There is, in fact, no sharp distinction between public and private (outer and inner) life, since the law has the responsibility and the authority to shape both. Introducing those terms here is already extending beyond the juridical concerns of the ancient world.

Jumping forward quite a bit, this view changes most significantly with Hobbes. In Hobbes, we find that the law cannot reach particular areas of private life (e.g. thoughts.) Law has a natural limitation. This introduction of the natural as it relates to law is vitally important here. In Hobbes (and later Locke, Rousseau, etc.) we find the introduction of the idea of natural rights that belong to the individual. Whereas in Aristotle, the law is what defined the rights of the political subject, in Hobbes, et. al., the authority of the law ends when it reaches natural rights. The law is circumscribed by them. This changes the function of the law. Now the law exists in order to secure the natural rights of the political subject. This is, for Marx, a “natural-normative” dialectic in which natural rights are taken to be pre- or non-normative in the precise sense that they simply are. They exist in nature and the fact of their existence is not a normative claim. That is, it is not that natural rights ought to exist–they simply do exist. The normative element enters when the law secures those rights as inscrutable, when the law protects their naturalness.

I don’t want to jump to Marx just yet, however. First, I want to look at the how Hegel constructs a citizen-subject on the basis of the above political-legal structure in The Philosophy of Right. As mentioned, absolute freedom has become the new foundation of ethical life. The ontological role of freedom in Hegel is far, far more complex than I am covering here. Absolute freedom is an historical process, an unfolding in history (as compared to Kant, who argues that we have absolute freedom already.) The idea of development is vital for what now follows. Freedom is two primary activities for Hegel which unite in a third:

1) Freedom is the capacity to abstract from everything–to not be determined by any specific determination. In other words, certain truths do not have certain necessary consequences, particularly when it comes to choosing how to act. For example, the fact that I am an American does not determine that I act in accordance with whatever that label means to other Americans. I can choose to not be determined by that category.

2) Freedom is also the reverse of this–the capacity to give yourself to a determination as a reason for choosing how to act.

3) Finally, freedom is self-determination. It is the unity of both aspects. It is to abstract from all determinations and posit oneself as determined.

Freedom unfolds through self-determination. These determinations, however, require that there be others in order to differentiate between determinations. This establishes a particular relation to others for Hegel. He writes that the other is actually not an external limitation; it is yourself appearing as something external. What the other wants is part of a social relation, becomes part of your own will. One cannot have freedom as Hegel understands it apart from a social relation. To be a part of a social structure is the condition of the possibility of freedom as self-determination. The social relation precedes the individual.

This includes a special role for education as well. Remember that for Aristotle, education is something external (the law) being imposed upon the subject in order to make it a political subject. In Hegel, education (Bildung) is an internal activity grounded in social relations. Education in Hegel’s sense is not the gaining of specific skills–it is becoming skillful. This “skillfulness” is essentially a learning how to be a social being, learning the relations of one’s will (self-determination) to something it is not. This isn’t simply an inter-subjective understanding, but a way that subjects see themselves as part of a social relation which is prior to their individuality. This includes estimating consequences, determining what is good and bad for the self in order to alter drives, and eventually trying to orient oneself toward happiness, which is a rather utilitarian way of thinking about it. But note that what is chosen is ultimately a self-determination–not something imposed by the external force of the law. The law instead secures the individual’s ability to choose.

Bildung ultimately consists of generalizing oneself so that the will may be transformed into an ethical-social self-determining subject. Generalization is what allows one to participate in the social. In other words, if I want to participate in a community of any size, including my immediate family, I have to give up some of the particularities that constitute me as an individual subject when I enter into a social relation. I can’t force everyone to like the food I like, go to bed and wake up when I do, read philosophy and theology, etc. The highest form of this participation, for Hegel, is ethical participation: the free will that desires free will, that wills itself. Freedom becomes our actual way of life such that we live the gooditself.

What we’ve reconstructed here is one version of what Marx will later call the bourgeois subject. In short, Hegel has instrumentalized the state for bourgeois society. The generalization of the individual is not truly general–it is directed at a particular set of social relationships, outside of which an individual cannot participate in the community–especially the economic. In the next few posts that I write, I will focus on the Marxist response which sets the stage for Weber’s analysis of this structure (which is what I’m really interested in.)